Author: Joey deVilla

[via Miss Fipi Lele] Here’s an odd bit of Star Wars-related promotion work: a circa 1979 anti-drunk driving public service announcement with music and visuals from the cantina at Mos Eisley:

(This article also appears on Tucows Farm.)

If you’re a techie in the Toronto area and are looking to have your brain stimulated tonight, I strongly recommend that you check a talk by one of the guys working on Perl 6, Damian Conway. Whether you’re someone just getting their feet wet with programming or an old warhorse who remembers what column FORTRAN lines containing statements start on, you’re going to find Damian’s presentation and his madcap presentation style very enlightening and entertaining. Here’s the abstract for his talk, Fun With Dead Languages:

Watch in mesmerized terror as Damian hacks code in five unrelated languages (none of them Perl). Along the way, you’ll also learn about modern archaeological techniques, bidirectional cross- dressing, Ancient Greeks hackers, improbable romances, the real Club Med, why programmers shouldn’t frequent casinos, the language of moisture vaporators, C++ mysticism, conversational Latin, state machines on steroids, feeding the dog the old-fashioned way, the shocking truth about anime, programming without variables or subroutines, the Four Voids of the Apocalypse, Microsoft’s new advertising campaign, what the Romans used instead of braces, drunken stonemasons, the ancient probabilistic wisdom of bodkins, how to kill a language with a single byte, and the price of fish.

Damian is a clever techie, a brilliant speaker and one helluva charming guy to boot. At last night’s DemoCamp presentation, where he gave us a whirlwind tour of some of the features in Perl 6, he did what no other human being has been able to do, ever: he made me give a crap about Perl. And all in the space of 15 minutes.

The presentation takes place tonight at 6:30 p.m at the Bahen Centre for Information Technology on the University of Toronto Campus. It’s at 40 St. George Street, a block north of College. I believe it’s in the big lecture hall at the back on the main floor, and I also believe that there’s no admission charge.

As I said to the audience at the end of DemoCamp last night: “Go catch Damian’s presentation. He will pull down the pants of your mind.”

July 4th, in addition to being America’s Independence Day, is also Filipino-American Friendship Day.

As a friend of the Philippines, America is like Beverly Hills 90210’s Steve Sanders — generally seen as a friend to Brandon Walsh, even though he’s often a dick and has more money than brains. President William McKinley’s mission of “benevolent assimilation” included “civilizing and Christianizing” the Philippines, even though there was a civilization there and the country was mostly Christian already, and the “independence” granted to the Philippines in 1946 included a U.S. military presence and a trade act that made the Philippines an economic ward to the U.S., with provisions such as the disallowance from manufacturing or selling any products that might “come into substantial competition” with American businesses. The terms of the trade act were so dickheaded that even the U.S. State Department opposed them.

(I’m aware that American colonialism has had positive results on the Philippines as well, most notably its democratic traditions, which someday both the Philippines and the U.S. will figure out. The Philippines could also stand to learn a thing or two about American gumption and dynamism.)

For a more comprehensive writeup, go check out the Philippine History Group of Los Angeles’ essay, The Independence Day That Wasn’t.

Bonus Reading Material

Speaking of Steve Sanders: where are the kids from Beverly Hills 90210 now?

To my American readers, friends and relatives: Happy Independence Day!

Bill Pullman played the president in Independence Day.

In honour of this day, here’s Bill Pullman’s speech to the troops before the final assault on the aliens in Independence Day [1.6 MB MP3 file]. Enjoy!